How to feel happier for longer – Gratitude and Hedonic adaptation

As a life coach and therapist, I’m hearing more and more clients saying that they are using some of form of gratitude practice as part of their path to wellbeing and flourishing. Gratitude diaries, the three good things exercise, or gratitude visits are all great ways of activating a sense of gratitude which in turn leads to positive mood and functioning.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little about how gratitude can help as an antidote to one of the biggest contributors to life dissatisfaction, Hedonic adaptation.

What is Hedonic Adaptation?

Hedonic adaptation is the process by which an individual adapts to and eventually becomes dissatisfied with previously desired objects or status. For instance, Hedonic adaptation is when we become unhappy with our top of the range Iphone when we are aware that the newer model exists, or when we acclimatise to our 100k job and feel that it’s not enough.

When hedonic adaptation takes root, we become unimpressed by the things or status that we have acquired, and we feel that our lives will only be fulfilled when we have the next thing. Ultimately, Hedonic adaptation means that whatever we have or experience, our Happiness will always return to a baseline level. The happiness that we get from more stuff, more status, and more experiences is ultimately short-lived. This can lead to a sense that we are always chasing fulfilment – the fabled “hedonic treadmill.”

The Evolutionary basis of Hedonic adaptation

There are solid reasons why our happiness doesn’t last forever, and to understand these it is helpful to look towards the evolutionary function of hedonic adaptation.

Imagine the world of our prehistoric ancestors. It was a much less immediately gratifying environment in which they lived and the active seeking out of resources was an important part of survival. If we remained complacent and content after finding a food source, or shelter, we would not be sufficiently motivated to move forward to find future resources. The eventual dissatisfaction that we experience after acquiring resources served as an emotional driver to move on and keep getting what we need to survive, often against an environmental back drop of threat and challenge.

Secondly, the intensity of emotion that is experienced when we are happy and content requires energy. The body expends fuel resources physically when we are feeling great. Naturally, we can’t expend this energy forever, and in an environment in which food resources were scarce, it was economical for the body to limit the physiological experience of happiness and return to baseline after a set period.

Hedonic adaptation, as the name suggests, enhances adaptability. In an evolutionary context, adapting to our environment enhances survival fitness. To remain in a state of contentment, and to not adapt to changes in our environment would leave us vulnerable to not ensuring a long-term future.

All of the above points serve to show us that Happiness is designed to be elusive. We are hardwired to feel happy for only short periods of time. It is part of the human condition.

However. We are the only species that has the ability to recognise these aspects of our hardwired biology, and be able to do something about it. This is where gratitude comes in.

Gratitude – The Hedonic treadmill solution

One of the challenges of highlighting the importance of positive psychological interventions is that, on some level to some people, they can seem trivial or not focused on what we view as being the problem. That is, we are often focused on fixing what is wrong with us, we struggle to emphasise what could be good. Again, this is partly a reflection of our hardwired negativity bias – it was more evolutionarily beneficial to focus on threats than on benign or neutral events – and as such positive psychology coaching often finds itself having to justify how developing the positive can serve dividends in terms of enhancing wellbeing.

Fortunately, Gratitude has been well researched across the field of positive psychology.

A 2012 study conducted by researchers Sheldon and Lyubomirsky explored how hedonic adaptation could be reduced by moderating variables of variety and appreciation. The appreciation variable contained measures of appreciation, savouring, and gratitude. The study was designed to test the validity of the Hedonic adaptation prevention (HAP) model (see below).

The model proposes that Hedonic adaptation can be reduced, and wellbeing variables such as positive emotion and subjective wellbeing can be maintained, through the introduction of interventions designed to increase appreciation variables and variety. Their study found this to be the case and it opened the door to further research in which gratitude, savoring and variety can influence sustained wellbeing.

At an emotional and physical level, the changes that we experience when we develop gratitude are associated with satiety (having enough and feeling fulfilled) and abundance and are inconsistent with emotional regulatory systems which aspire to seek out further reward or avoid threat. Developing gratitude is a powerful emotional regulation strategy which overpowers our evolved needs to always seek out and consume more.

Gratitude itself is now a fundamental element of a multitude of positive psychology therapy and coaching approaches, used across all aspects of the wellbeing spectrum from mental illness to flourishing.

How to increase Gratitude

Here are my go-to evidence-based Gratitude enhancing techniques with links:

The Gratitude Visit
The 3 Good things exercise
Gratitude Meditation
Gratitude Journalling

Developing a Gratitude practice

As with all things worth doing, getting better requires practice and positive psychological attributes like Gratitude is no different. Try to think of gratitude as an ongoing process – sometimes we will “get there”, other times it might be a little bit harder.

What we do know, however, is that at the brain level, “cells that fire together, wire together.” This means that repeated practice of gratitude leads to changes in brain wiring using neuroplasticity, meaning that the gratitude neural network becomes easier and easier to access over time.

I’m grateful that you have read this article…

If you want to find out more about using gratitude to improve your wellbeing, or would like to embark upon a course of positive psychology coaching with me then get in touch at the email purepositivecoaching@gmail.com or call me on 07887 701 176

George Maxwell